I wonder what is supposed to happen to gravity itself. Does gravity bend gravity? How does it propagate?
If gravity affects propagation of gravity, doesn't Moon (or any other object) form a "gravity gravity lens"?
Note that this effect could only be observed from a distance from the bending object, so there would be no noticeable effect as the Earth spins around.
And please explain to me how it would be better not to raise issue now? How is it better to simply wait for it to pop up later in the form of an actual patent lawsuit after the EU passes the Software Patent Directive?
Sure it is good for the software patent issue to raise it now, but not for OSS. The software patent opposition should use tools that do not harm OSS. I believe there are plenty.
In any case, even if Linux projects such as München's are used as an argument for the software patents, they should be presented to the people deciding about the patents, not as a demand to München's city council to halt the project.
The worst case scenario is that the Munich Linux project gets killed now rather than later by actual patent suits.
The worst case scenario is much worse than that. I believe there are thousands if not millions of eyes around the world looking how Linux does in München. Linux has no proven record as an large-scale IT solution for organisations. Possibly thousands of organisations, such as other cities, are looking at München as a test case for Linux, to see if Microsoft's TCO arguments and other FUD are really true. If the case fails, for any the reason, those organisations may lose their interest. If they lose their interest, the damage to adoption of Linux may be critical for Linux's future.
If the patents kill Münich's project now, they don't really kill much anything from the government perspective, as one city's IT project is not much and OSS isn't an important component of the European IT infrastructure yet. It's not taken that seriously yet. If they threathen to kill 100 cities and an essential part of the infrastructure a few years later, it can't be overlooked.
The best case scenario is that raising the issue now will dissuade the EU from legitimatizing software patents in the first place.
It is rather hard to say how much influence the München case would have for such decisions. The number of OSS businesses and jobs are non-existent compared to proprietary software industry, and governments only care for industries that have clear and proven business models behind them, ones that create jobs and tax euros.
Are the greens complete idiots? They aim to abuse and destroy the most famous success story of Open Source Software just for the sake of software patents. They have created more harm to OSS than Microsoft managed to create in München with all their money and dirty tactics.
The guy who made the inquiry to the München administration claimed to be a "supporter of OSS". Uhh. All the Microsoft's FUD pales in comparison with this "self-FUD". Oh how they must be laughing right now.
While I entirely support most of the environmental and economical issues of the greens, and have voted for them occasionally, they have proven amazingly irrationally stubborn in their opposition to nuclear power and certain other issues. Politicians are not guaranteed to be from the brightest class of humanity, and this case very much proves that.
The problem, of course, is that most of the others are even worse choises than greens.
These appear to be just careless personal opinions given by one redneck army commander. In the interview (as quoted for example in Iltalehti), he uses low-language words such as "dude" (jätkä) and "farting". He also belittles the actual medical statements made by doctors, which are often "panic disorder", "anxiety", etc.
These clues tell us what this article is probably about: the commander is just an example of people with severe attitude problems in the army. He simply over-generalizes a huge number of problems into a single cause, which he himself probably understands nothing about. Really, why do they let that sort of people even give such public statements?
Just read the interview and really think about what the commander says....unless you share the problem. Calling people "sissies who need to be sent home to grow up" is a typical symptom of such attitude problems.
It's of course nice that some people have the mentality needed for the army, which requires "taking orders" and "setting limits" (as the commander says). Such mentality might not be ideal or even desired for much (although perhaps some) of the life outside the army.
But yes, I agree that those people who best fit in the military should go there, and do their job well. And not expect everybody else to be like them.
I have invented a wonderful test for parallel universes:
Play russian roulette as long as you wish and you don't die.
If there are parallel universes in the way that they are created at each moment, every possible event occurs in some parallel universe.
Therefore, if you at some point die in one universe, you will keep on living in some others.
Since you can only observe that you live, it follows from the Anthropic Principle that if there is an infinite number of You, there is always a You that observed that you did not die.
So if you play russian roulette and get a *click* a thousand times with different revolvers (or even with pistols as they have a small probability of jamming), you can be quite certain that the universe is a branching multiverse.
Of course, if there is just a single universe, you'll just die.
This method can also be used for financial gain:
Attach an electically triggered bomb in your head
Connect a national lottery result service to the bomb
$$$PROFIT$$$
Notice that you don't actually have to play Russian Roulette, you can just wait -- people get killed mostly by accidents or random diseases such as cancers or heart attacks. So, if you live to be 1000 years old, there must be something really strange going on. (Of course, that's not much of a comfort if you have gradually demented to mental level of an avera cabbage.)
Perhaps we shouldn't try to contact them, not yet at least.
Physics and mathematics may not be universal but be closely related to our general perception of reality, which largely depends on the kind of life we have here on Earth, how our brains evolved to better grasp the environment we live in. We have certain set of physical concepts, also at the scientific level, which are more or less intuitive for our brains. The Others have theirs.
Any way of thinking limits the solutions we can find. We can take some different viewpoints and change our thinking, but there could be limits with that. We can only change our thinking if we can think of the other ways of thinking, which might not always be possible. The Others may have the same problem.
Therefore, finding a solution for some universal problems might need much bigger change in thinking than even what the Others could be capable of making. To solve the problems, they would need to find completely new forms of life, each with their new potential. Some of the forms of life could be "planted" and evolved freely -- the Others acting as "creator-gods" -- but that would be limited by the kinds of life they are capable of inventing, which is again limited by their brain. A better choise could be to let the Nature do its job of inventing the way, and then hunting for solutions.
For example, according to modern physics, the universe has a problem: it's dying. After some 10^100 years, it'll be just some thin energy particles here and there. Let's assume that the Others have noticed the problem too and haven't found a solution.
If we now made contacts with the aliens, the free development of our own ways of thinking would quickly stop and we would be assimilated in Their culture and science. We would have no special position any longer and would no longer be that promising to the Others. We would be just cosmic rabble.
Probably abducting some portion of people would be useful, to create interesting cultural hybrids that would combine the ways of thinking from the both worlds, but the main stream culture should be kept in isolation as long as possible.
WRT the religion question, the Others might believe that they were created to solve the same question, or alternatively living in an artificial universe, created to solve the same question...or that they are the First. If they (or we that matter) have any reason, however, they would notice that the question is unanswerable and therefore suspension of belief is the only rational choise.
Or maybe they are Pantheists. That would probably be much in line with Carl Sagan's ideas of Extraterrestials.
It sounds incredible to me that Microsoft actually tries to get governments to translate their software for them free, while Open Source localization groups are desperate with getting governments to participate or provide even little funding.
Perhaps we would need to organize better?
For some time, I've been trying to find out if there exists a collective effort for localizing open source software, which covers both all softwares and all locales.
Currently, we seem to have two types of localization efforts: software-specific and national efforts. For example, the major OSS softwares, such as KDE, Gnome, and OpenOffice have organized translation efforts. Then there are some national efforts. For example, in Finland, we have organized a joint national effort as a working group, which gathers the different Finnish localization teams together and aims to provide them publicity, recruiting, funding, other resources, and generally a channel for cooperation. We currently have KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice, Debian, and some other translation teams working together on common issues such as quality, vocabulary, and tools. I have noticed that there exists also some other national or language-specific efforts, such as for Arabic and South-African languages. However, I haven't found any cooperation effort between these national efforts, where we could participate.
So, what I'm looking for is a universal effort that covers both all the different localization projects for different softwares, and for the different languages (or nationalities). There exists some more-or-less generic efforts, such as the Translation Project, but those which I've seen cover only a limited set of software products (TP covers some 100 but it's still rather limited).
If you know about such an universal cover effort, please tell me.
Otherwise, perhaps the time is ripe for starting to plan for such an effort. I'm not talking about any massive organization, just a loose, light-weight organization that would serve as a center for information sharing and cooperation. Well, basicly a well-structured web portal would suffice.
I begun to wonder about this last fall, when I started designing a portal-based information system for the Finnish national localization effort and did preliminary organization analysis. I noticed that many of the tools we would need would also be useful for others. Well, of course it may be difficult to unify such tools between different efforts, as different efforts have their own preferences, but it would be nice to get to know what other efforts need and what they could contribute.
Our Finnish national effort is still slowly forming, but we are quite active in certain areas such as quality assurance. We have had one joint workshop event so far and have planned to have one twice a year (next one is scheduled for May). Last year, we produced a 26 page report about the status of different Finnish localization projects. We have also tried to make contacts with translation departments of universities. Our effort for getting funding is still in infancy.
We would very much like to share "patterns" of organizing national and software-specific efforts and serving the actual translation teams.
So, is there anyone interested in world domination?
The most common words are often repeated two or three times, for example - the equivalent of English using 'and and and' - giving weight to the hoax theory.
Repetition, especially thrice, is actually very common at least in Ancient Egyptian language, and many modern occult texts are based on egyptian mysticism. It is puzzling that the writers don't know that.
IANAEIAE, but three repetitions typically refer to plural form (such as ntrw, gods, usually depicted as three "axes" when ntr, god, is usually depicted with a single axe) or collective words (such as "property"). In some cases, the repetition seems to be done even more times, especially with the word ntrw, gods, when referring to "really all" gods.
For some other examples, in the novel Sinuhe the Egyptian, the name of the main female character is Nefernefernefer (nefer=beautiful). However, Ancient Egyptian does not appear to use repetition for comparative forms (such as "most beautiful"), so I'm not sure why the word is repeated.
It should be noted though that the Ancient Egyptian language was not known during the 17th century as it had been lost much earlier and was not rediscovered before the 19th century. There was some variants alive though, such as the Coptic liturgic language, of the form of Egyptian Christianism.
It might well be that some other semitic or persian languages have the similar features. If not in common speech, possibly in texts held as sacred.
The number of three does have very special meaning in many forms of occulticism. Mmm... Hermes Trismegistos, the Thrice Greatest Hermes.
No, it reduces the number of rich people by preventing middle class people from becoming rich.
The tax money goes to someone. But yes, evening the incomes with the poor also reduces the number of rich people. I don't really see why that is so terrible, if at that cost we can help the society develop as a whole to be more prosperous, secure, and just.
Seriously. If your family makes $20000, and you pay no tax (as is presently the case in the US), how does the fact that a guy making $50000 pays 33%, and a guy making $200K pays 38%, make you any richer?
It does, as the money goes to paying public services, such as health care, education, and so on. Many or most (I'm not sure if all) European countries have free or heavily subsidized health care and education (also at university level).
You confuse equality of opportunity ("everyone can get rich, some will, some won't") with equality of results ("social equality", "social justice", or "evening out income").
I would say the latter is a precondition for the former. You don't have equal opportunities unless you have social equality (as with reasonable basic income). That should be rather clear. Poor have much bigger thresholds for developing themselves or investing. They're much more likely to become edged out in poverty trap.
The real question is, why would a regressive tax like VAT ever be a good thing in the highly civilized countries of Europe? 15%? 25%? It seems to me that the only reason for a highly applicable and highly regressive tax like this, that is also combined with a high income tax is to keep poor people poor and dependent on the state for most of their needs. Heaven help us if somebody try to rise above their proper station in life.
Nonsense, that's the exact opposite of the reality. Where on earth did you get that idea? Strongly progressive income taxing acts as a way to even out income. That means reducing the number of poor people, which means giving them and their children reasonable chances to advance towards prosperity.
Evening out income results in social equality and equal opportunity, which is the basis of true democracy. That's the basic idea behind European social democratic ideology, to my understanding. Ironically, equal opportunity is also the required basis for economic liberalist ideology, so I'm not quite sure what they're whining about.
VAT isn't progressive though, so it doesn't act towards evening out income. It apparently has other purposes, such as controlling the use of income towards investing and certain favourable forms of consumption, instead of fostering a culture of conspicuous consumption. There might be other factors too.
My suspicion is that this is also the reason why the EU wants to add this tax: It is a way to force citizens to buy stuff from the EU instead, thus supporting the local industry.
That's very much the reason, just add the word fairly to supporting. Just like all American companies have to pay VAT for the stuff they sell, all domestic European companies have to pay VAT when they sell online services. As these American companies apparently do not, they would have a clear unfair advantage in competition.
It would be rather idiotic to support the competitiveness of foreign companies with tax-free status, while taxing domestic companies. The situation would, of course, be different if online services had a tax exemption status also in Europe.
The case is somewhat similar as the hormone beef quarrel. European farms are forbidden by law to use hormones to beef up the beef. American farms are not. Therefore, if hormone beef imports from America are allowed, they have an unfair advantage over domestic producers, and the actual result is that consumers get the unwanted hormone beef on their tables anyhow, regardless of the laws that intended to prevent that in the first place. That's why they have changed the target of prohibition from production to selling and importing. USA of course doesn't like that.
People looking at the source code doesn't help a thing as they can't find out the source of the source just by looking at the source. All you can find out is, "Hey, they really look similar, I wonder why?"
What needs to be communicated, publicly, is the exact files and lines of code in Linux sources that allegedly violate SCO's Intellectual Prescious. However, even then the Linux community can do only half of the job in determining the source of the source. The other half is determining who wrote the SCO code and when. That requires a police investigation -- interrogations of old or former SCO developers and such.
The review of the allegedly violating code has no legal meaning. Only what happens in court matters.
And only a complete idiot would sign such an NDA with a company that has gone crazy suing others for NDA violations. Only write an NDA manufactured by a court dealing with the matter, when you have been called as a witness.
Another article in the magazine gives a reference to a short analysis about the SCO case by Garner a month ago. It's a pretty interesting read, as Gartner is a highly regarded research and consulting company around the world. What they think and say may have more weight than what is written in a Linux magazine.
It also contains interesting notes about due diligence to companies involved in open source development:
IS departments using Linux or other open-source code should have an internal process, possibly with advice from their legal departments, to perform due diligence (see Note 1) on the nature and origin of open-source code for possible infringement of patents. System administrators must be admonished to submit open-source code to inspection for potential violation of patents. An open-source quality assurance process should determine and approve allowable code for production systems. Such efforts may slow adoption of Linux in high-end production systems of critical applications.
(Note 1)Due Diligence Options
Name and reputation of source and origin of software code
Names of the contributors and developers
If outside libraries are included, the source of the code, its use and deployment
Checks with the Free Software Foundation on patent infringement claims
Negotiations for indemnification from liabilities, or support from the vendor
I have a little theory of my own. Let's assume that the world is a multiverse that "splits" indefinitely at each quantum event. The splitting creates apparent randomness in the world from the perspective of observers. An observer can obviously only observe events that do not cause his destruction.
Now, if the observer wants to observe a certain event, all he has to do is hook a detector of that event to a machine that destroys himself. For example, lottery results are affected by quantum-level randomness. Hence, if you hook lottery info service to a bomb that blows your head, you will always win in lottery.
However, while this works nicely in personal level, it is somehow depressing to think that in most universes, your friends will see your head explode and you're gone forever. They'd be sad. So, take your friends with you! Make it better, take the entire world with you! All you need is a machine that destroys the world if you lose in lottery. (Talk about bad losers, ehm?)
The downside of such machine is that it would probably not work. You see, it might be more probable that the machine burns a fuse than that you win in lottery.
We could use the Miracle Machine to make things better in the world too! For example, hook it in stock market and make it cause destruction of the world if the markets crash. It could also make us safe -- make it trigger if a nuke blows in your home country (or anywhere else). We would eternally observe world peace!
I somehow get very nervous when a scientist wants to test a theory, when if false, the test itself causes destruction of the world.
"'Ooooooh' and 'aaaaaah', that's how it always starts. But then later comes the running and the screaming." -- Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park
That code is under GPL, period, or else they can't distribute without THEM violating the codes license.
I just realized that they might actually intend to go for that.
You see, they might say that the proprietary code that they distributed along with their Linux is not distributed under GPL. In that case, the users have no right to use it without a license from SCO.
Yes, yes, distributing non-GPL stuff in GPL software would be a violation of GPL and copyrights, but so what? That might not nullify their copyrights to their own code. FSF or some other entity would certainly sue them for the violation and demand compensation for...what damages? Yes, there is a concept of statutory damages, but those damages have limits, while the potential profits (hundreds of millions) from a SCO-Linux license do not.
However, it would probably not work that easy. While the statutory damages have a ceiling, a judge can rule that the defendant must pay damages for each violation if he continues to violate the copyright knowingly (after the ruling)! Such possibility makes sense -- a violator should not profit from continuing to break someone's rights.
The problem is that SCO would then have to stop selling their own Linux. That would not stop them from milking Linux users until Linux is dead.
The difference here is that it was actually Caldera that released the code. They distributed it, they wrote the press release. Once that's done, the fact that they failed to verify what it was that they released seems like their own problem.
That's not correct. Distributing doesn't matter if it is done either accidentally or because of a fraud. The legal point here is due diligence, and cross-checking Linux codebase against their own codebase is everything but routine operation, and might even be impossible.
However, this argument would only matter if they unknowingly distributed something they didn't intend to. That is not the case with SCO -- they continued distributing their (alleged) code under a conflicting license.
It doesn't matter a bit if the copyright holder did not place the code in GPL licensed codebase, if they knowingly continue distributing it under GPL. And if it does, they are breaking GPL by distributing non-GPL code in a GPL program. If they win, sue 'em, I say. Either way, Linux wins legally.
The better example would be if an MS engineer with access to Windows code dropped a Trojan horse in there that would wipe out people's hard drives on his birthday.
Due diligence applies also to this, to some extent. It's a court's decision what diligence is due.
Also notice that proprietary licenses must contain a warranty, and the provider can't disclaim just everything (well they can but it doesn't apply). GPL licensed software, on the other hand, can be provided without warranty, "as is", so diligence is not needed at all.
Caldera HAD to know what was in the Linux kernel because their Linux distros use a special Caldera-patched version of the kernel. So it's not like they didn't look at the code, they had to in order to create a special patched kernel right?
Why do you think that by just making a driver makes a programmer "know" the entire Linux code, what, a few million lines? What makes you think that same coder "knows" all the code owned by the company? Not to mention that the UNIX code was not actually written at SCO, so few there really "know" it.
It's really silly if you think about it. Linux kernel is huge. Will you know every person living in Brazil just by visiting there, and know that none of those persons are illegal immigrants (or whatever) from your home country?
Any judge would see the impossibility. IANAL, and don't know what the laws say, but I don't think that your argument would hold in court.
Distributing the code in their own Linux may not be relevant. If you buy or sell stuff and the other party is found guilty of fraud (misleading you in the bargain), he is liable, and you retain your property and receive compensation. If you accidentally transfer money to wrong account, the receiver of the money must return it (in most cases anyway). The SCO case is similar in many senses.
We must think about this threat to Linux deeper than that.
About every GCC release breaks most of the software written for previous version, especially for C++, as it's standard keeps "refining" constantly, as does GCC's interpretation of it. Not to mention the extensions.
Right now I'm busy changing all "#include" to "#include", "friend Foo" to "friend class Foo", and adding "using namespace std" everywhere. What next?
You will find plenty (likely, a large majority) of proprietary software creators who will stand by you in saying they don't want competition to be limited by software patents.
I agree.
Do not go to war with proprietary software makers over patents (and making special exemptions for OSS is such an act). Most of them are your allies in the fight against monopolists.
Good point. However, giving OSS implementations of patented algorithms an edge over proprietary implementations would benefit also makers of proprietary software, as they can use OSS implementations freely (if for example LGPL licensed), and concentrate on their speciality.
However, not making special exemptions for OSS would give proprietary implementations a huge edge, as they can pay royalties, even if unwillingly. In practice, strong patentability threatens to destroy OSS altogether.
Hence, having strong patent laws with appropriate exceptions would benefit both OSS and proprietary makers, except the ones playing with the patents.
Of course, the current situation with no patentability for software is probably the best and safest choise.
But there is something that we do know. The rule in Europe right now is good, there's no software patents, there's no risk at all for individuals, SMEs, and open source in general. All of the good things that you speculate might come from this clause already exist.
Very true.
Well, as I said, if there were strict software patent laws with very wide amendments regarding OSS implementations, the laws would effectively benefit OSS by discouraging proprietary implementations. The problem is that the strong IP advocates would never accept such wide amendments, except perhaps by mistake, as they would be their worst nightmare.
3. The Directive should provide for a mechanism that ensures that open source software development will not be negatively affected. Amendment 17 empowers the European Commission to monitor the impact of the Directive on innovation and competition, and in particular on small and medium businesses. This mechanism will guarantee against any adverse effect of the Directive on the community of independent developers, in particular on those that are contributing to the development of open source software products.
That doesn't sound too bad. As Perens and rest of us are very worried about the future of independent OSS developers, some kinds of amendments might make the patent laws reasonable. I don't know.
For example, allowing strong software patentability and then relieving any OSS implementations from patent claims would actually make OSS a better choise than proprietary! Who would want to pay huge royalties when they can use an OSS implementation. On the other hand, such an amendment would create a loophole that would effectively nullify the patent laws as companies could release just the patented algorithm as a LGPL library.
I really don't believe the pro-patent people would want such loopholes, so it's unlikely that they would support very broad amendments. More likely, they might support amendments that deny suing of individuals while allowing suing companies such as Red Hat and other companies packaging and selling OSS. Such solution would make no difference to the OSS community, as the success of GNU/Linux strongly depends on the commercial exploitation of OSS.
I wonder what has happened to those home chemistry kits for kids I saw in stores some 25 years ago? I haven't seen them for years, at least in Finland.
It would also be kind of boring to buy a kit that are classified as "8 years and up", "10 and up", "12 and up", and it stops there. Where are the "30 years and up" boxes???
The situation to get chemistry kits may have become globally worse in last 1? years. Also here in Finland, a "home chemist" blew up himself in a mall (pictures from the location), killing about 5 others and wounding some 100. I guess people would look at me very suspiciously if I went to a store asking for a "home chemistry set" now...
Slashdot Mirror
light is bent during ... solar eclipse
I wonder what is supposed to happen to gravity itself. Does gravity bend gravity? How does it propagate?
If gravity affects propagation of gravity, doesn't Moon (or any other object) form a "gravity gravity lens"?
Note that this effect could only be observed from a distance from the bending object, so there would be no noticeable effect as the Earth spins around.
And please explain to me how it would be better not to raise issue now? How is it better to simply wait for it to pop up later in the form of an actual patent lawsuit after the EU passes the Software Patent Directive?
Sure it is good for the software patent issue to raise it now, but not for OSS. The software patent opposition should use tools that do not harm OSS. I believe there are plenty.
In any case, even if Linux projects such as München's are used as an argument for the software patents, they should be presented to the people deciding about the patents, not as a demand to München's city council to halt the project.
The worst case scenario is that the Munich Linux project gets killed now rather than later by actual patent suits.
The worst case scenario is much worse than that. I believe there are thousands if not millions of eyes around the world looking how Linux does in München. Linux has no proven record as an large-scale IT solution for organisations. Possibly thousands of organisations, such as other cities, are looking at München as a test case for Linux, to see if Microsoft's TCO arguments and other FUD are really true. If the case fails, for any the reason, those organisations may lose their interest. If they lose their interest, the damage to adoption of Linux may be critical for Linux's future.
If the patents kill Münich's project now, they don't really kill much anything from the government perspective, as one city's IT project is not much and OSS isn't an important component of the European IT infrastructure yet. It's not taken that seriously yet. If they threathen to kill 100 cities and an essential part of the infrastructure a few years later, it can't be overlooked.
The best case scenario is that raising the issue now will dissuade the EU from legitimatizing software patents in the first place.
It is rather hard to say how much influence the München case would have for such decisions. The number of OSS businesses and jobs are non-existent compared to proprietary software industry, and governments only care for industries that have clear and proven business models behind them, ones that create jobs and tax euros.
Are the greens complete idiots? They aim to abuse and destroy the most famous success story of Open Source Software just for the sake of software patents. They have created more harm to OSS than Microsoft managed to create in München with all their money and dirty tactics.
The guy who made the inquiry to the München administration claimed to be a "supporter of OSS". Uhh. All the Microsoft's FUD pales in comparison with this "self-FUD". Oh how they must be laughing right now.
While I entirely support most of the environmental and economical issues of the greens, and have voted for them occasionally, they have proven amazingly irrationally stubborn in their opposition to nuclear power and certain other issues. Politicians are not guaranteed to be from the brightest class of humanity, and this case very much proves that.
The problem, of course, is that most of the others are even worse choises than greens.
First of all, the story is probably just rubbish.
...unless you share the problem. Calling people "sissies who need to be sent home to grow up" is a typical symptom of such attitude problems.
These appear to be just careless personal opinions given by one redneck army commander. In the interview (as quoted for example in Iltalehti), he uses low-language words such as "dude" (jätkä) and "farting". He also belittles the actual medical statements made by doctors, which are often "panic disorder", "anxiety", etc.
These clues tell us what this article is probably about: the commander is just an example of people with severe attitude problems in the army. He simply over-generalizes a huge number of problems into a single cause, which he himself probably understands nothing about. Really, why do they let that sort of people even give such public statements?
Just read the interview and really think about what the commander says.
It's of course nice that some people have the mentality needed for the army, which requires "taking orders" and "setting limits" (as the commander says). Such mentality might not be ideal or even desired for much (although perhaps some) of the life outside the army.
But yes, I agree that those people who best fit in the military should go there, and do their job well. And not expect everybody else to be like them.
I have invented a wonderful test for parallel universes:
Play russian roulette as long as you wish and you don't die.
If there are parallel universes in the way that they are created at each moment, every possible event occurs in some parallel universe.
Therefore, if you at some point die in one universe, you will keep on living in some others.
Since you can only observe that you live, it follows from the Anthropic Principle that if there is an infinite number of You, there is always a You that observed that you did not die.
So if you play russian roulette and get a *click* a thousand times with different revolvers (or even with pistols as they have a small probability of jamming), you can be quite certain that the universe is a branching multiverse.
Of course, if there is just a single universe, you'll just die.
This method can also be used for financial gain:
Notice that you don't actually have to play Russian Roulette, you can just wait -- people get killed mostly by accidents or random diseases such as cancers or heart attacks. So, if you live to be 1000 years old, there must be something really strange going on. (Of course, that's not much of a comfort if you have gradually demented to mental level of an avera cabbage.)
Perhaps we shouldn't try to contact them, not yet at least.
Physics and mathematics may not be universal but be closely related to our general perception of reality, which largely depends on the kind of life we have here on Earth, how our brains evolved to better grasp the environment we live in. We have certain set of physical concepts, also at the scientific level, which are more or less intuitive for our brains. The Others have theirs.
Any way of thinking limits the solutions we can find. We can take some different viewpoints and change our thinking, but there could be limits with that. We can only change our thinking if we can think of the other ways of thinking, which might not always be possible. The Others may have the same problem.
Therefore, finding a solution for some universal problems might need much bigger change in thinking than even what the Others could be capable of making. To solve the problems, they would need to find completely new forms of life, each with their new potential. Some of the forms of life could be "planted" and evolved freely -- the Others acting as "creator-gods" -- but that would be limited by the kinds of life they are capable of inventing, which is again limited by their brain. A better choise could be to let the Nature do its job of inventing the way, and then hunting for solutions.
For example, according to modern physics, the universe has a problem: it's dying. After some 10^100 years, it'll be just some thin energy particles here and there. Let's assume that the Others have noticed the problem too and haven't found a solution.
If we now made contacts with the aliens, the free development of our own ways of thinking would quickly stop and we would be assimilated in Their culture and science. We would have no special position any longer and would no longer be that promising to the Others. We would be just cosmic rabble.
Probably abducting some portion of people would be useful, to create interesting cultural hybrids that would combine the ways of thinking from the both worlds, but the main stream culture should be kept in isolation as long as possible.
WRT the religion question, the Others might believe that they were created to solve the same question, or alternatively living in an artificial universe, created to solve the same question...or that they are the First. If they (or we that matter) have any reason, however, they would notice that the question is unanswerable and therefore suspension of belief is the only rational choise.
Or maybe they are Pantheists. That would probably be much in line with Carl Sagan's ideas of Extraterrestials.
It sounds incredible to me that Microsoft actually tries to get governments to translate their software for them free, while Open Source localization groups are desperate with getting governments to participate or provide even little funding.
Perhaps we would need to organize better?
For some time, I've been trying to find out if there exists a collective effort for localizing open source software, which covers both all softwares and all locales.
Currently, we seem to have two types of localization efforts: software-specific and national efforts. For example, the major OSS softwares, such as KDE, Gnome, and OpenOffice have organized translation efforts. Then there are some national efforts. For example, in Finland, we have organized a joint national effort as a working group, which gathers the different Finnish localization teams together and aims to provide them publicity, recruiting, funding, other resources, and generally a channel for cooperation. We currently have KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice, Debian, and some other translation teams working together on common issues such as quality, vocabulary, and tools. I have noticed that there exists also some other national or language-specific efforts, such as for Arabic and South-African languages. However, I haven't found any cooperation effort between these national efforts, where we could participate.
So, what I'm looking for is a universal effort that covers both all the different localization projects for different softwares, and for the different languages (or nationalities). There exists some more-or-less generic efforts, such as the Translation Project, but those which I've seen cover only a limited set of software products (TP covers some 100 but it's still rather limited).
If you know about such an universal cover effort, please tell me.
Otherwise, perhaps the time is ripe for starting to plan for such an effort. I'm not talking about any massive organization, just a loose, light-weight organization that would serve as a center for information sharing and cooperation. Well, basicly a well-structured web portal would suffice.
I begun to wonder about this last fall, when I started designing a portal-based information system for the Finnish national localization effort and did preliminary organization analysis. I noticed that many of the tools we would need would also be useful for others. Well, of course it may be difficult to unify such tools between different efforts, as different efforts have their own preferences, but it would be nice to get to know what other efforts need and what they could contribute.
Our Finnish national effort is still slowly forming, but we are quite active in certain areas such as quality assurance. We have had one joint workshop event so far and have planned to have one twice a year (next one is scheduled for May). Last year, we produced a 26 page report about the status of different Finnish localization projects. We have also tried to make contacts with translation departments of universities. Our effort for getting funding is still in infancy.
We would very much like to share "patterns" of organizing national and software-specific efforts and serving the actual translation teams.
So, is there anyone interested in world domination?
The most common words are often repeated two or three times, for example - the equivalent of English using 'and and and' - giving weight to the hoax theory.
Repetition, especially thrice, is actually very common at least in Ancient Egyptian language, and many modern occult texts are based on egyptian mysticism. It is puzzling that the writers don't know that.
IANAEIAE, but three repetitions typically refer to plural form (such as ntrw, gods, usually depicted as three "axes" when ntr, god, is usually depicted with a single axe) or collective words (such as "property"). In some cases, the repetition seems to be done even more times, especially with the word ntrw, gods, when referring to "really all" gods.
For some other examples, in the novel Sinuhe the Egyptian, the name of the main female character is Nefernefernefer (nefer=beautiful). However, Ancient Egyptian does not appear to use repetition for comparative forms (such as "most beautiful"), so I'm not sure why the word is repeated.
It should be noted though that the Ancient Egyptian language was not known during the 17th century as it had been lost much earlier and was not rediscovered before the 19th century. There was some variants alive though, such as the Coptic liturgic language, of the form of Egyptian Christianism.
It might well be that some other semitic or persian languages have the similar features. If not in common speech, possibly in texts held as sacred.
The number of three does have very special meaning in many forms of occulticism. Mmm... Hermes Trismegistos, the Thrice Greatest Hermes.
No, it reduces the number of rich people by preventing middle class people from becoming rich.
The tax money goes to someone. But yes, evening the incomes with the poor also reduces the number of rich people. I don't really see why that is so terrible, if at that cost we can help the society develop as a whole to be more prosperous, secure, and just.
Seriously. If your family makes $20000, and you pay no tax (as is presently the case in the US), how does the fact that a guy making $50000 pays 33%, and a guy making $200K pays 38%, make you any richer?
It does, as the money goes to paying public services, such as health care, education, and so on. Many or most (I'm not sure if all) European countries have free or heavily subsidized health care and education (also at university level).
You confuse equality of opportunity ("everyone can get rich, some will, some won't") with equality of results ("social equality", "social justice", or "evening out income").
I would say the latter is a precondition for the former. You don't have equal opportunities unless you have social equality (as with reasonable basic income). That should be rather clear. Poor have much bigger thresholds for developing themselves or investing. They're much more likely to become edged out in poverty trap.
The real question is, why would a regressive tax like VAT ever be a good thing in the highly civilized countries of Europe? 15%? 25%? It seems to me that the only reason for a highly applicable and highly regressive tax like this, that is also combined with a high income tax is to keep poor people poor and dependent on the state for most of their needs. Heaven help us if somebody try to rise above their proper station in life.
Nonsense, that's the exact opposite of the reality. Where on earth did you get that idea? Strongly progressive income taxing acts as a way to even out income. That means reducing the number of poor people, which means giving them and their children reasonable chances to advance towards prosperity.
Evening out income results in social equality and equal opportunity, which is the basis of true democracy. That's the basic idea behind European social democratic ideology, to my understanding. Ironically, equal opportunity is also the required basis for economic liberalist ideology, so I'm not quite sure what they're whining about.
VAT isn't progressive though, so it doesn't act towards evening out income. It apparently has other purposes, such as controlling the use of income towards investing and certain favourable forms of consumption, instead of fostering a culture of conspicuous consumption. There might be other factors too.
My suspicion is that this is also the reason why the EU wants to add this tax: It is a way to force citizens to buy stuff from the EU instead, thus supporting the local industry.
That's very much the reason, just add the word fairly to supporting. Just like all American companies have to pay VAT for the stuff they sell, all domestic European companies have to pay VAT when they sell online services. As these American companies apparently do not, they would have a clear unfair advantage in competition.
It would be rather idiotic to support the competitiveness of foreign companies with tax-free status, while taxing domestic companies. The situation would, of course, be different if online services had a tax exemption status also in Europe.
The case is somewhat similar as the hormone beef quarrel. European farms are forbidden by law to use hormones to beef up the beef. American farms are not. Therefore, if hormone beef imports from America are allowed, they have an unfair advantage over domestic producers, and the actual result is that consumers get the unwanted hormone beef on their tables anyhow, regardless of the laws that intended to prevent that in the first place. That's why they have changed the target of prohibition from production to selling and importing. USA of course doesn't like that.
Speaking of rats, I'm always glad to have an opportunity to present these pictures of
pet rat mayhem; here he's posing in the computer.
People looking at the source code doesn't help a thing as they can't find out the source of the source just by looking at the source. All you can find out is, "Hey, they really look similar, I wonder why?"
What needs to be communicated, publicly, is the exact files and lines of code in Linux sources that allegedly violate SCO's Intellectual Prescious. However, even then the Linux community can do only half of the job in determining the source of the source. The other half is determining who wrote the SCO code and when. That requires a police investigation -- interrogations of old or former SCO developers and such.
The review of the allegedly violating code has no legal meaning. Only what happens in court matters.
And only a complete idiot would sign such an NDA with a company that has gone crazy suing others for NDA violations. Only write an NDA manufactured by a court dealing with the matter, when you have been called as a witness.
IANAL, etc.
It also contains interesting notes about due diligence to companies involved in open source development:
(Note 1) Due Diligence Options
I have a little theory of my own. Let's assume that the world is a multiverse that "splits" indefinitely at each quantum event. The splitting creates apparent randomness in the world from the perspective of observers. An observer can obviously only observe events that do not cause his destruction.
Now, if the observer wants to observe a certain event, all he has to do is hook a detector of that event to a machine that destroys himself. For example, lottery results are affected by quantum-level randomness. Hence, if you hook lottery info service to a bomb that blows your head, you will always win in lottery.
However, while this works nicely in personal level, it is somehow depressing to think that in most universes, your friends will see your head explode and you're gone forever. They'd be sad. So, take your friends with you! Make it better, take the entire world with you! All you need is a machine that destroys the world if you lose in lottery. (Talk about bad losers, ehm?)
The downside of such machine is that it would probably not work. You see, it might be more probable that the machine burns a fuse than that you win in lottery.
We could use the Miracle Machine to make things better in the world too! For example, hook it in stock market and make it cause destruction of the world if the markets crash. It could also make us safe -- make it trigger if a nuke blows in your home country (or anywhere else). We would eternally observe world peace!
I somehow get very nervous when a scientist wants to test a theory, when if false, the test itself causes destruction of the world.
"'Ooooooh' and 'aaaaaah', that's how it always starts. But then later comes the running and the screaming." -- Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park
That code is under GPL, period, or else they can't distribute without THEM violating the codes license.
I just realized that they might actually intend to go for that.
You see, they might say that the proprietary code that they distributed along with their Linux is not distributed under GPL. In that case, the users have no right to use it without a license from SCO.
Yes, yes, distributing non-GPL stuff in GPL software would be a violation of GPL and copyrights, but so what? That might not nullify their copyrights to their own code. FSF or some other entity would certainly sue them for the violation and demand compensation for...what damages? Yes, there is a concept of statutory damages, but those damages have limits, while the potential profits (hundreds of millions) from a SCO-Linux license do not.
However, it would probably not work that easy. While the statutory damages have a ceiling, a judge can rule that the defendant must pay damages for each violation if he continues to violate the copyright knowingly (after the ruling)! Such possibility makes sense -- a violator should not profit from continuing to break someone's rights.
The problem is that SCO would then have to stop selling their own Linux. That would not stop them from milking Linux users until Linux is dead.
This makes me worry.
IANAL, BIPOOSD, IDKA, IAN.
The difference here is that it was actually Caldera that released the code. They distributed it, they wrote the press release. Once that's done, the fact that they failed to verify what it was that they released seems like their own problem.
That's not correct. Distributing doesn't matter if it is done either accidentally or because of a fraud. The legal point here is due diligence, and cross-checking Linux codebase against their own codebase is everything but routine operation, and might even be impossible.
However, this argument would only matter if they unknowingly distributed something they didn't intend to. That is not the case with SCO -- they continued distributing their (alleged) code under a conflicting license.
It doesn't matter a bit if the copyright holder did not place the code in GPL licensed codebase, if they knowingly continue distributing it under GPL. And if it does, they are breaking GPL by distributing non-GPL code in a GPL program. If they win, sue 'em, I say. Either way, Linux wins legally.
The better example would be if an MS engineer with access to Windows code dropped a Trojan horse in there that would wipe out people's hard drives on his birthday.
Due diligence applies also to this, to some extent. It's a court's decision what diligence is due.
Also notice that proprietary licenses must contain a warranty, and the provider can't disclaim just everything (well they can but it doesn't apply). GPL licensed software, on the other hand, can be provided without warranty, "as is", so diligence is not needed at all.
IANAL, IDKA
Caldera HAD to know what was in the Linux kernel because their Linux distros use a special Caldera-patched version of the kernel. So it's not like they didn't look at the code, they had to in order to create a special patched kernel right?
Why do you think that by just making a driver makes a programmer "know" the entire Linux code, what, a few million lines? What makes you think that same coder "knows" all the code owned by the company? Not to mention that the UNIX code was not actually written at SCO, so few there really "know" it.
It's really silly if you think about it. Linux kernel is huge. Will you know every person living in Brazil just by visiting there, and know that none of those persons are illegal immigrants (or whatever) from your home country?
Any judge would see the impossibility. IANAL, and don't know what the laws say, but I don't think that your argument would hold in court.
Distributing the code in their own Linux may not be relevant. If you buy or sell stuff and the other party is found guilty of fraud (misleading you in the bargain), he is liable, and you retain your property and receive compensation. If you accidentally transfer money to wrong account, the receiver of the money must return it (in most cases anyway). The SCO case is similar in many senses.
We must think about this threat to Linux deeper than that.
Right now I'm busy changing all "#include" to "#include"
Umh, intended to say: changing "#include <iostream.h>" to #include <iostream>". Damn markup.
About every GCC release breaks most of the software written for previous version, especially for C++, as it's standard keeps "refining" constantly, as does GCC's interpretation of it. Not to mention the extensions.
Right now I'm busy changing all "#include" to "#include", "friend Foo" to "friend class Foo", and adding "using namespace std" everywhere. What next?
You will find plenty (likely, a large majority) of proprietary software creators who will stand by you in saying they don't want competition to be limited by software patents.
I agree.
Do not go to war with proprietary software makers over patents (and making special exemptions for OSS is such an act). Most of them are your allies in the fight against monopolists.
Good point. However, giving OSS implementations of patented algorithms an edge over proprietary implementations would benefit also makers of proprietary software, as they can use OSS implementations freely (if for example LGPL licensed), and concentrate on their speciality.
However, not making special exemptions for OSS would give proprietary implementations a huge edge, as they can pay royalties, even if unwillingly. In practice, strong patentability threatens to destroy OSS altogether.
Hence, having strong patent laws with appropriate exceptions would benefit both OSS and proprietary makers, except the ones playing with the patents.
Of course, the current situation with no patentability for software is probably the best and safest choise.
But there is something that we do know. The rule in Europe right now is good, there's no software patents, there's no risk at all for individuals, SMEs, and open source in general. All of the good things that you speculate might come from this clause already exist.
Very true.
Well, as I said, if there were strict software patent laws with very wide amendments regarding OSS implementations, the laws would effectively benefit OSS by discouraging proprietary implementations. The problem is that the strong IP advocates would never accept such wide amendments, except perhaps by mistake, as they would be their worst nightmare.
That doesn't sound too bad. As Perens and rest of us are very worried about the future of independent OSS developers, some kinds of amendments might make the patent laws reasonable. I don't know.
For example, allowing strong software patentability and then relieving any OSS implementations from patent claims would actually make OSS a better choise than proprietary! Who would want to pay huge royalties when they can use an OSS implementation. On the other hand, such an amendment would create a loophole that would effectively nullify the patent laws as companies could release just the patented algorithm as a LGPL library.
I really don't believe the pro-patent people would want such loopholes, so it's unlikely that they would support very broad amendments. More likely, they might support amendments that deny suing of individuals while allowing suing companies such as Red Hat and other companies packaging and selling OSS. Such solution would make no difference to the OSS community, as the success of GNU/Linux strongly depends on the commercial exploitation of OSS.
C. elegans belongs to the phylum of nematodes.
Funnily, nematodes are called "sukkulamadot" in Finnish, which translates to "shuttle worms" in English.
I wonder what has happened to those home chemistry kits for kids I saw in stores some 25 years ago? I haven't seen them for years, at least in Finland.
It would also be kind of boring to buy a kit that are classified as "8 years and up", "10 and up", "12 and up", and it stops there. Where are the "30 years and up" boxes???
The situation to get chemistry kits may have become globally worse in last 1? years. Also here in Finland, a "home chemist" blew up himself in a mall (pictures from the location), killing about 5 others and wounding some 100. I guess people would look at me very suspiciously if I went to a store asking for a "home chemistry set" now...